Doomsday Book

Connie Willis

In general I strongly dislike time-travel stories with their attendant
implausibilities, but sometimes they have other qualities which redeem
them. Doomsday Book is set in 2054, when time travel is run of the mill
but everything else is, rather implausibly, pretty much like the present.
The only real exception is a random collection of tech gadgets such as
video phones and laser candles.

Kivrin, a female undergraduate history student at Oxford, is to be the
first person sent back to the Middle Ages (to 1320), because — wait for
it! — no qualified historian is available. Everything goes wrong with
the mission — the bungling incompetence of the academics organising
it is, unfortunately, quite plausible — and she is delivered instead
to 1348, the year the Black Plague reached England. Meanwhile a flu
epidemic has hit 2054, and Oxford is quarantined. The bulk of the book
consists of parallel accounts of the two epidemics, which are worked
out much better than the time-travel setup.

Despite the weaknesses in the science and the implausible 2054 Oxford,
I enjoyed Doomsday Book a lot. I much prefer well-written books with
lousy science to engineering manuals dressed up as novels. I'm not sure
it deserved its Hugo and Nebula award double, but Doomsday Book is
definitely worth a read, especially if you are interested in epidemiology
(used to produce a rather clever detective problem) or medieval English
history.